Miami Photographic Observatory inaugurates “Ethereal Chronicles of Cities” by Lili(ana)

09/27/25

Miami Photographic Observatory inaugurates “Ethereal Chronicles of Cities” by Lili(ana)

Aluna Art Foundation announces the opening of the second residency of its project, the Miami Photographic Observatory, with “Ethereal Chronicles of Cities”, an exhibition by Lili(ana), who has made Miami her home since 1997.

Cities, wrote Italo Calvino, “are a collection of many things: memories, desires, signs of a language; they are places of exchange, as every economic history book explains, but these exchanges are not only of goods—they are also exchanges of words, desires, memories.” Lili(ana) wanders through the cities, which have been expanding relentlessly, with a powerful instrument in her hands: a camera.

“At the threshold of the visible,” she explains, “the camera captures the moment of encounter with the intangible forces that animate our world. Each photograph is influenced by the singularity of the instant in a place. What the camera receives in that instant remains sacred, unalterable. What emerges reveals not just what appears before the lens, but what exists [or has existed] in those liminal spaces—the infinite possibilities that dwell in those hidden realms.”

Her wanderings follow intuitive drifts, yet also the paths traced by memory itself, by the very configuration of each city. She seeks to grasp through the lens (an extension of her inner gaze) that other parallel body, somehow gravitating or invisible, which gives rise to the ethereal images of her work. “Since 1999, I have been engaged in this exploration I name ‘Beyond this visible world’—a title that serves as an open framework, giving me the freedom to move forward or retreat without limit of expression.” Surpassing the visible boundaries of the medium, and using photography as “a tool for access and give expression to the inaccessible,” she creates images that function as passages of encounter, inhabited by “that which seeks to be revealed”: ethereal planes that hover over the physical world, timelessly holding the energy and the imprint of all that has ever dwelled within them.

The resulting images remain open to the polyhedral reading of the thousand-and-one eyes that will behold them. In contemplating them, we could not help but recall, on one hand, the chapter of the subtle cities that Italo Calvino held so dear, and to reflect once more on the possibility that photography might recover the “aura” Walter Benjamin feared would vanish in its mechanical reproduction. In that chapter of his book Invisible Cities, Calvino unfolded “a theme of lightness curiously linked to the theme of the city,” which for him carried a “visionary evidence.” The photographs unfolding from Lili(ana)’s wanderings, for their part, hold aesthetic and ethereal visions distilled from the very existence of cities themselves. For her first exhibition at the Miami Photographic Observatory, four cities gather: Miami and its Everglades, Bristol, Edinburgh, Santiago de Compostela, and Bilbao.

If Benjamin attributed decisive importance to the fact that the aura of a work of art should never be severed from its ritual function, then this is precisely the function that brings these photographs into being. They do not merely encapsulate the desires that shaped the cities, but also the multitemporal and gravitating memories that mark the courses of their existence. In creating her photographs, the artist also undertakes spiritual work through which she tends to, and cares for, the aura of the cities themselves. Lili(ana)´s practice carries within it her parallel vocation: that of a healer of memories, as personal as they are collective.

About Lili(ana)

 She is an American Venezuelan artist born in Panama. Her project Fore(st)sight …Pondering on the Future of Forest, has traveled, taking on different forms and resulting in solo exhibitions at the following venues: MIFA Gallery, Miami, Florida (2025), Bernheim Forests and Arboretum in Clermont, Kentucky, during their ColorFest event (2024), C.B, Smith Park, Pembroke Pines, Florida, USA (2022-2023).

Lili(ana)´s work has been featured in Hungary, France, Spain, China, Argentina, Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, as well as in the United States. Notable venues include the Universitat de València, in Valencia, Spain; the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California; Zendai MOMA in Shanghai; and Museo Granell in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Her practice extends to online university seminars, digital exhibitions, art fairs, and international festivals like the Budapest Photo Festival in 2018. She received two consecutive Broward County Artist Support Grant Awards.